Evaluation of image quality metrics for color prints

Abstract

New technology is continuously proposed in the printing technology, and as a result the need to perform quality assessment is increasing. Subjective assessment of quality is tiresome and expensive, the use of objective methods have therefore become more and more popular. One type of objective assessment that has been subject for extensive research is image quality metrics. However, so far no one has been able to propose a metric fully correlated with the percept. Pedersen et al. (J Elec Imag 19(1):011016, 2010) proposed a set of quality attributes with the intention of being used with image quality metrics. These quality attributes are the starting point for this work, where we evaluate image quality metrics for them, with the goal of proposing suitable metrics for each quality attribute. Experimental results show that suitable metrics are found for the sharpness, lightness, artifacts, and contrast attributes, while none of the evaluated metrics correlate with the percept for the color attribute. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.